“Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.”

“Between 9am and 3pm is when I work most intensely.”

“Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas, and there's no way I'd do anything to undermine that belief.”

“Edinburgh is my favourite city. We'll be doing a lot of children's theatre and galleries.”

“Every day is a gift with a child, no matter what problems you have.”

“I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.”

“I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.”

“I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.”

“I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.”

“I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.”

“I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.”

“I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister.”

“I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.”

“If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn't, I'd ignore it.”

“If we think of what's up ahead, with climate change and wars over water, it's very frightening.”

“I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.”

“It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.”

“Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.”

“My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.”

“Poetry and prayer are very similar.”

“Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.”

“The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.”

“The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.”

“The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.”

“When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.”

“You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.”